One of the things that set me off on the topic of neglected world-building was that it might be one of the contributing factors in my interest in my primary game waning somewhat. (All right, that and the fact that we’re on a storyline designed for a player who quit before it got going; my ideas end up taking far too long to implement.) I know that it’s a lot easier for me to be enthused about a storyline if I’m still finding things I didn’t quite realize, or getting to show off shiny new ideas. And yet, for some reason, undead behemoth leafy sea dragons (as in the relative of the seahorse) aside, I don’t really feel like I’ve been putting my world-building to its full potential.

Part of it, I think, is my own fault. I had one sequence where the group stumbled upon three or four talky-antagonists in a row, where the last was definitely suffering by proximity to the ones who had come before, so I backed off. I planned a sequence that would be necessity both take a while and lead the group far from civilization of any sort, and… well, that in itself, combined with a little bit of My Library Does Not Have Near Enough Deep Ocean References, cut off most of that source of inspiration.

Part, though, is the players; they haven’t exactly been seeking out new parts of the occupied world, nor even really been trying to carve out social dynamics when not in penguin-submersibles in the middle of the wrong ocean (which wouldn’t seem so odd except that two of the three PCs are comparatively new). As a result, I’m not having to pull out “this area, and you can find these characters there, and they interact with each other in this way” on a semiregular basis, nor constantly throw in characters from places the group has never been that do something different and interesting.